Sunday, May 20, 2012

Barrier Islands of Georgia

Sometimes,
we in the Northwest think we have the only franchise on natural beauty.After spending a week in South Georgia on one
of the Atlantic barrier islands, Saint Simons, I’m getting the feeling we should
open another store.

I’ve always
liked the sense of motion set off by the tectonic action that is part of living
in the Northwest, the great Juan de Fuca Plate plunging under the North
American Plate creating the basics of our place, thrusted-up and folded
mountain ranges, topped by working volcanoes and the occasional shaker.In turn, this movement creates the temperate
rain forests on one side of the region and the great dry regions on the
other.It all provides an abiding feeling
that you are moving with it, rafting a little bit closer to Canada everyday.

Google Earth

On Saint
Simons, I felt a similar essential motion, though the motive force is hydraulic.A rising ocean scrapes sand from the eastern beaches,
stores it up in great, shifting sandbars, pushes it around the edges of the
islands every day.Eight foot tides carry
this energy to the west, joining with the runoff of the silty rivers inland,
creating flat salt marshes where an inch of elevation means success or failure
to hundreds of species.The islands are
picked up and put down again, a bit closer to the older western
shore.

Understanding
and living with the causes of this movement organizes most hours of the day,
connecting you to a rhythm played out in a soft and warm envelope of air with just
a fleeting bit of humidity, like a long sigh. The barrier islands are a system
rising out of several thousand years of climate change that continues and accelerates today. Observing
and connecting to those rhythms, all the while entertained by the sensational
bird and other wildlife the islands host, was the essence of my very busy week
on Saint Simons Island.

University of Georgia

There are
really several sets of sets of barrier islands, evidence of the really old ones
seen in exposed clay as far away as Waycross, 50 miles to the west.Closer to the shore there are two groups of
islands, the first set formed in the Pleistocene, 35-40,000 years ago, when the
shoreline was four to six feet higher than it is today.The other time, at the peak of the last great
ice age, 18,000 years ago, the shoreline was 80 miles to the east, at the edge
of the continental shelf, because huge volumes of seawater were locked up in the great
ice sheet.Fairly rapid warming led to a
fast moving rise in sea levels.As it
slowed, 4-5,000 years ago, these new barrier islands rose to the east of the older
ones.At that time, the ocean was rising
4-6 inches a century, stable enough to allow island formation and also pushing
the new islands to the west, which continues today but with higher water levels at a rate of 12-14 inches/century.

Recurved Spit
Southwest Coastal Group

The
technical term for the island’s creation is a 'recurved spit.'Longshore currents from the north create the
islands, curving and extending the land to the south.Inside and protected by the arm of this new
land is where the marsh grows.

Behind the
islands, the salt marsh stretches across very considerable distances – four to
eight miles wide -- the great plains of this seashore.Because of water piling up north of the Georgia
Barrier Islands, the tides pack a real punch, eight to nine foot tides at Saint
Simons and other nearby islands – Jekyll, Sea Island, Sapelo, Wolf, Cumberland,
Blackbeard, Tybee, Ossabaw.The tides sweep
the salt marsh twice a day.Filling
quickly and overflowing into the adjacent flats, the tides make the small
creeks, looking peaceful and flat, an athletic event in the kayaks, dunking a
couple of our number not more than twenty feet after pushing off.

Because the
salt water doesn’t linger long on the edges of these water courses, the thick
Cordgrass grows to its full height, about six feet.In other areas, where water spills onto the
lower levels and creeps slowly along under a hot sun, the Cordgrass is less
vital, reflecting the soil salinity and the anaerobic muds, growing to just three
feet.Where the water stays longer, for
nearly the full tidal cycle, Cordgrass is three to six inches if it survives,
but is often replaced by hardier grasses.In places where the marsh has grown into sandy highpoints, just a couple
of inches higher than the surrounding land, water may stay for just an hour or
so, but it bakes and evaporates, pulling up salt from below by capillary action
and crusting it on top.These are called
salt pans and vegetation does not grow there.

Instructables

Other life is transient on the salt pan, even the Fiddler Crabs, otherwise
ubiquitous across the great flats, find some other place to be.Research in North Carolina had the burrows of
Mud Fiddler Crabs at 4-28/square foot in a salt marsh there.The 100 miles of Georgia’s coast contain
nearly a half million square miles of marshland, a third of all the salt marshes on
the east coast of the United States.They are a great factory of life forms serving many purposes, but most significant is that they are the flyways
of eastern North America’s bird life.

The house
we stayed in was directly across the marsh from a small, squat monument to the
War of Jenkins' Ear and its climactic battle, The Battle of Bloody Marsh, where
the Spanish failed in their lengthy attempt to expand their influence from St. Augustine
in Florida further up the coast to Georgia.

The Spanish
did not do well in Georgia.The Creek Indians
were not enthralled by the busybody Jesuits.They murdered or enslaved the missionaries
and worked with the English to keep the Jesuits out.The Spanish turned their attention to rivals
in Europe.They chased out the French,
who saw this part of Georgia as a great place to transport the Huguenots,
French protestants whom they couldn’t hang fast enough at home.

Despite their failures, the Spanish
had treaty rights from the War of the Spanish Succession, a conflict based on
growing influence over Spain by France and the frustration the Dutch had about their Spanish rulers.While Spain’s wartime
political objectives were not met, they did gain the right to board British
ships in America to ensure that the trading concessions they were forced to
give were not being abused by the serial plunderers and smugglers they knew the
Brits to be.A commercial captain named
Robert Jenkins, was boarded in 1731 by a Spanish captain who found evidence of
contraband and created a judicial solution on the spot, cutting off one of Jenkins’
ears and handing it back to him.

Georgia Encyclopedia

While the
popular telling of the story has the disengaged ear enraging Parliament who
then immediately declared war, it was actually seven years before Jenkins
brought his severed ear to Parliament! How was Jenkins able to keep his ear for
that period of time?While there are
engravings of Jenkins showing the ear to the lawmakers, there is little
commentary on how a fleshly part of the head, no more than cartilage and skin, and
seven years detached, could be so compelling.Nonetheless, it apparently helped the argument and the British declared war.Three years after Parliament's declaration, the Battle of Bloody Marsh ended the conflict.

Georgia Encyclopedia

A large
Spanish force had invaded, broke through the island’s shoreline defenses, followed
the creeks up towardthe British
stronghold at Fort Frederica and were ambushed from the thick part of the
forest along the marsh, something the botanists call the Forest Climax, the
thick canopy of oaks and pine that signals the boundary of the marsh.The Spanish broke and ran, those that could.

Resting in
a patch of Cordgrass along Postell Creek, thinking how I might get out of this damned kayak, I
felt the tide start to push the other way, toward the sea.Happily, I let it take me.Soon happy turned to a general concern that I
was going pretty damned fast.A dolphin
breaking the water nearby was more than cool, but I quickly turned my attention
to the sandbar along a channel to the east, our bird watching objective.It required paddling across the broad, sturdy tidal flow
and managing my beating heart.

At the
sandbar, we saw a remarkable collection of birds, many of them mating.Also mating were the horseshoe crabs, a
species 450 million years old, huge and slow moving creatures caught on the sandbar, burrowing into the sand until the water comes again.Looking away, across the choppy ocean to the
east, we saw two examples of how much sand the ocean moves about the edges of
these islands.There used to be a
sandbar called Pelican Bar, a great sweep of sand reduced to a small break in
the ocean surface.At one time it hosted
vegetation and even a tree.Two years
ago, it disappeared and was replaced by Haas Bar, several thousand yards away
and still barren, except for the massive numbers of birds, migratory and
resident.

Crossing
over to the beach, we pulled up the canoes and watched how hard the plants
worked to keep all this movement at bay.My favorite was the Beach Oat, a tall, bushy grass existing along the
beach ridges.Once a plant establishes
there, it knocks down blowing sand, creating a small mound, covering up
competing plants and establishing a colony of just Beach Oat.The State of Georgia makes it illegal to take
this plant off the beach, it protects so well.

We also saw
our friend from the salt marsh, Cordgrass.Eroded into the tidal flow of the creeks, old plants are pushed out to
sea, collected there and brought back home the eastern beach with a new look
and function, placed by the tide into orderly rows, they are homes for fleas,
beach crabs and other critters the shorebirds fancy.

The house
we had was on the marsh side and the noise of the birds was so various and loud that I
speculated to myself that the sound engineer of the Masters Golf Tournament responsible
for its rich bird call sound track was renting the house next door.

We were
joined in the morning for coffee and later for cocktails along the house's little pool
above the marsh by Red Wing Blackbirds and a pair of Long Tailed Grackles who
would wash up or cool off by knocking water over themselves, throwing it into the air with their heads.They even practiced full
immersion bathing, appropriate for animals growing up around all these Southern
Baptists, jumping into the pool and popping back out.Sometimes they were so wet they could hardly
fly to a nearby tree to preen.

We saw two
species of vulture – first the Turkey Vulture, one of whom sat on a dock until
deep dusk and waited for us to leave, not ten yards away, so he could have the
carrion stashed on the other side of the marsh creek.

Clusters of Black Vultures, whose head lacks
the red skin of the Turkey, hung around the edges, waiting for a mistake by the
Marsh Bunnies, residents of the marsh edge and oh so smitten by the tender and
sweet grass made by the lawns of the house creatures.

Audubon's Woodland Stork
Printable Images

There are
280 species of birds living in or visiting these barrier islands.People say the Bald Eagle is making a big comeback
here, though we saw only one, an immature who lost a fight with a big vulture
over something in the marsh.Osprey
are everywhere.The kings of the salt
marsh are the long legged birds, ciconiiformes-- Ibises, Herons, Spoonbills, Storks,
Egrets, Bitterns.Two sitings were
notable.An enormous Great Egret sat
comfortably on the dock nearby, solitary, watchful and uncommon.We saw a pair of Woodland Stork, quite rare,
twice and hoped they might have been two pairs, though we doubt it.

Other
notable species here are professional golfers.St.Simons is home to PGA Tour
players Davis Love III, Matt Kucher, Zach Johnson, Lucas Glover and Jonathan
Bird.They can be found at the Sea
Island Club, a lovely and exclusive club and at the airport, just off the main
road, where a clutch of jets patiently wait.

There are
many slave stories, of course.Nearby
Jekyll Island was the place where the Wanderer
landed, in late 1858, containing 409 people who had survived the passage.It was the last slave ship delivery on
American soil.

Ebos Landing
Georgia Encyclopedia

Another
story is that of Ebos Landing and why some black fishermen still don’t fish in
Dunbar Creek.In the early part of the
19th Century several just-arrived slaves were sold in Savannah and
put on a smaller boat headed for St. Simons, about 70 miles away.The Igbos are a tribe from the southeast
region of Nigeria whose lot has been one of global and national predation
and the greatest suffering.In the 60s, as nations
and corporations battled for the oil that lay under their land, the Igbos were
caught up in a civil war, creating briefly their own country, Biafra, the name synonymous
then of starving children, replaced today by Darfur or South Sudan.

As the slave
boat approached St. Simons, some stories have them committing suicide by scuttling
the boat, drowning all on board.Others
have them taking over the boat and ‘heading for the swamp,’ a term calling up
the sure consequence of death.Rising
from this tragedy is a powerful mythology that they did not drown.Rather, they were able to gain the ability to
fly, turn themselves into buzzards and fly back to Africa.

A New Deal
Writers Project in 1940 recorded another telling of what is likely the most enduring
story of this region:

Ain't you heard about them? Well, at that time
Mr. Blue he was the overseer and . . . Mr. Blue he go down one morning with a
long whip for to whip them good. . . . Anyway, he whipped them good and they
got together and stuck that hoe in the field and then . . . rose up in the sky
and turned themselves into buzzards and flew right back to Africa. . . .
Everybody knows about them.

Novelist
Toni Morrison used the Ebos Landing story as the basis for her book Song of Solomon.

One other
slave story caught my attention on St. Simons.The biggest slave owner on the islands was the Butler family, owning 638
slaves in 1812, farming rice on Butler Island and cotton on St.Simons.A grandson, Pierce, was living well in Philadelphia where he saw a
performance, in 1832, given by Fanny Kemble, a British stage performer.He fell flat out, face down in love and
followed the later stops on her American tour.She took her time, but finally returned his love and they married, settling in Philadelphia, quickly having two children, both girls.

Fanny Kemble
Civil War Quilts

In 1836,
Pierce and his brother inherited the plantation and its many slaves and, after
a time, Fanny and her English anti-slavery views came to live on the plantation.She was a storyteller, a diarist, had a
great eye and an even bigger heart.Her
account of her time there, Journal of a Residence
on a Georgia Plantation in 1838 and 1839, did what few books about slavery
accomplished.She made room for the
voices of the slaves themselves, sharing the conversations she had with them.She vowed not to publish it, but her
experience there and her husband’s pro-slavery views had already doomed the
marriage.She left the island, continued
her performances and finally left for England, Pierce suing her for divorce.She published the
story in 1863 during the Civil War when she feared that Britain’s interests
might lead to their entering the war on the southern side.

Just before
the civil war began, Butler’s finances were in disarray and he was forced to
sell the slaves.He sold 500 people for
$300,000, the biggest single transaction of human beings in the history of American
slavery.The children of Fanny and
Pierce continued the familiar and corrosive slavery narrative.One daughter stayed with Pierce on the
plantation and was pro-slave, the other daughter moved to England to be with
her mother and was abolitionist.

This is a place to go back to.While a bit of a trek, it is a five hour flight to from Seattle to Atlanta and another
five hour drive to the island, it was worth it.We also caught a Class A Savannah Sand Gnats baseball game, Savannah and all its
joys just 70 miles up the road.

2 comments:

The book (in Paper or ebook) about de War of Cartagena de Indias: the History of Royal Navy, the British Army and the US Marine Corps (which enlisted Cpt. Lawrence Washington, brother of the first president of the USA George Washington), fighting against the Spanish forces at the Battle of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, in 1740-1741.